Top New York Prosecutor Sheds Light on What Milwaukee Can Expect in the Growing Heroin and Painkiller Crisis

“America’s
got a big taste for painkillers,” New York Special Narcotics Prosecutor Bridget
Brennan told the crowd assembled at last week’s regional symposium on heroin
and opiate addiction, which was launched by Milwaukee Common Council President
Michael Murphy and supported by the Zilber Family Foundation.

Brennan,
a Brookfield native, spoke about her experiences in New York so that Wisconsin
law enforcement, policy experts and health professionals can learn from them.

“What
I have seen as a prosecutor is that if you have supply you will have demand,”
Brennan said at the Heroin: Not On Our Watch regional symposium.

She
said New York’s last heroin epidemic occurred in the 1970s. But “generational
amnesia” has caused few to remember the horrors it created, she said.

“We’ve
forgotten and our children never knew about it,” Brennan said. “They never knew
the terrible, terrible consequences of doing heroin.”

The
current epidemic is unique in two ways, Brennan explained. Today’s heroin is
far more pure than it was back in the 1970s, leading more users to accidentally
overdose. It’s also happening at the same time American doctors are over-prescribing
legal opiate-based painkillers like oxycodone, Percocet or Vicodin, which are
gateway drugs to heroin.

The
problem facing law enforcement, Brennan said, is that heroin is illegal in
every state and can be intercepted by using tried-and-true methods of narcotics
busts, such as wiretapping. But narcotic painkillers are legal for
prescription-holders and beneficial for those who are suffering from high
levels of pain. That means that law enforcement has to get creative about
keeping them out of the hands of abusers.

“We
take very different approaches even though the effect of the opioid, the effect
of the addiction, is exactly the same,” Brennan said.

Big
Pharma Lied About Addictive Pills

The
painkiller problem “sneaked up” on law enforcement, Brennan said, but became
noticeable when prescription medications were being seized in New York
neighborhoods mostly known for crack and cocaine. Pills were also being dealt
by car delivery services and in ice cream trucks.

Brennan
said the appetite for narcotic pills developed in the mid 1990s, when doctors
were over-prescribing painkillers under the mistaken belief that they weren’t
addictive.

“They
would give you a 30-day supply when a 3-day supply was all you needed,” Brennan
said.

The
unused pills were resold on the black market and, as we now know, are
habit-forming. Brennan said that executives from Purdue Pharma, which claimed
that its Oxycontin couldn’t be abused, had to plead guilty to criminal charges
in 2007 for misleading doctors.

Brennan
said the legal prescriptions for oxycodone in New York spiked from a
half-million in 2007 to a million by 2010—in a city with a population of 8.5
million. Accidental overdose rates related to prescription drugs surged.

She
and her prescription drug unit worked with local medical providers to develop
solutions, including educating doctors on the dangers of over-prescribing
painkillers and preventing emergency rooms from prescribing more than a 3-day
supply of opiate drugs on weekends.

“Typically,
drug seekers will come into emergency rooms on the weekends to get a full
prescription, a 30-day prescription, and then they would be out selling it and
marketing it,” Brennan said.

Record-Breaking
Heroin Seizures

Brennan
said that for the first time in five years, the number of opiate prescriptions
has decreased in New York. But at this point the heroin epidemic has already
become entrenched in the city.

Roughly
20 years ago, when legal painkillers started becoming a problem, heroin began
being produced in Colombia, not Asia, and the North American Free Trade
Agreement (NAFTA) allowed for easier border crossings into the U.S. by Mexican
drug cartels.

“Heroin
to the cartels is a better product to sell than cocaine,” Brennan said. “They
can make more money off a kilo of heroin and it’s lighter and they can more
easily conceal more of it.”

She
said that in this year alone in New York about 300 pounds of heroin have been
seized, worth about $40-$60 million on the streets. That’s already eclipsed
heroin seizures in all of 2013 and every year since her office began tracking
it in 1991, Brennan said.

Today’s
heroin is far more pure and potent than it has been in the past, the likely
cause of so many accidental deaths. It’s trucked up from Mexico with stops in
large cities along the way, where it’s packaged in small glassine envelopes in
factory-like operations. In New York, it’s being sold via Craigslist with
specific code words, although she didn’t see any evidence of that happening in
Milwaukee—yet. She had to work with Craigslist executives to get them to remove
those terms from their site.

“Our
goal is to put a big crimp in the supply, to really break up that supply
chain,” Brennan said.

Poll

A Milwaukee Fire and Police Commission panel upheld the firing of former Milwaukee Police officer Christopher Manney for violating department rules last April when he encountered Dontre Hamilton before fatally shooting him. Do you agree with the commission’s decision?